History of a Suicide

by Jill Bialosky (Atria; $24)

In 1990, Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old half sister Kim gassed herself on exhaust fumes in their mother’s garage, and this elegiac book is both a memoir of grief and an investigation into the depressive mind—“the inchoate and terrible power of inner demons.” To perform her “psychological autopsy,” Bialosky reads Kim’s suicide through Melville and Plath, through medical literature, and through her sister’s diaries and college essays. The result is an affecting mixture of family history, primary documents, and, more questionably, imagined encounters between Kim and an unsuitable boyfriend. Bialosky began writing the book after adopting a son—she had lost two babies at birth, the first soon after Kim’s suicide—and the detective work becomes a form of mourning, and a means of getting past it. There’s no tidy ending, but Bialosky asserts, “The more I know, the more I can bear.” ♦

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